transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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[00:24] You're talking to me.

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Speaker 3:
[00:29] We are brought to you today by Birch Gold. You know, when the dollars, convertibility and gold ended in 1971 with the gold standard, gold was fixed at $35 an ounce. Fast forward to today. The US dollars lost over 85% of its purchasing power. Gold on the other hand, has increased in value by over 12,000%. Over 12,000%. That's why you want to connect with our friends at Birch Gold Group. It starts with education. They just announced their Learn and Earn Precious Metals event. This is a free online event that rewards you for learning the basics of investing in precious metals. Sign up to get free silver on your next purchase. Get even larger incentives as you go. The more you learn, the more you can earn. But you must act now as this special event runs only through April the 30th. All right. So start by texting my name, Steve, to the number 989898 to join Birch Gold's Learn and Earn Precious Metals event by April the 30th. Text Steve to 989898 today, 989898 Steve. And greetings, welcome to a special evergreen edition of the Steve Deace Show, That Would Be Me. Alongside Todd Urzin and Aaron McIntyre, you're gonna be hearing more from them coming up in the final segment of the show. Because of course, we have, we hope anyway, and trust and pray even, that we have an exciting conversation lined up for you here. And whichever day this ends up airing, we like to say we never know. Specifically when these evergreens are gonna run, we always trust they're gonna run when God wants them to run, all right? And the question on the table that we have for you today is do you have enough faith to be an atheist? Because that is the provocative challenge that Frank Turek puts before his audience nationwide on multiple podcasts, books, speeches. He is a prolific apologist and theologian. And unfortunately, very poor taste in people because we have a lot of the exact same friends, which means he needs to upgrade. And he joins us now for this conversation today, Frank. It's good to have you, brother. How are you?

Speaker 4:
[02:52] They're great, Steve Deace. Steve, I don't know if I'd be on a program that would invite me as a guest. So this might not work out.

Speaker 3:
[02:59] Very nice. A little Mark Twain there. I don't want to belong to a club that have me as a member. Indeed. Very nice. So, you know, let's let's start with, you know, how do you get into this racket? Right. I mean, like, how do you apply for the job of theologian, apologist to go to apologist.com? Is there is there a section for apologist and theologians on Indeed or career builder? Right. I mean, how does one get into this as you have?

Speaker 4:
[03:23] Well, growing up, I always believed in God. In fact, I went to Catholic high school because I'm from New Jersey and it's the law. You're going to be Catholic in New Jersey or skeptic or Jewish. I was Catholic and I always knew that there had to be a God because there had to be some kind of first cause out there. But I just never knew who Jesus was. And it wasn't until I went into the Navy, I met the son of a Methodist minister and I had so many questions for him. I just said, or he just eventually said to me, look, Frank, you just need to get Josh McDowell books. Evidence Demands a Verdict and More Than a Carpenter. Those were books written in like the 70s and this is about 1985. So I read those books and I realized the evidence showed that Christianity is true. And after I got out of the Navy, I met Norman Geisler, who at the time was kind of the Michael Jordan of what we call apologetics. That doesn't mean we're saying we're sorry. It means we're given evidence for why we believe God exists. Jesus rose from the dead. The Bible is telling the truth. Christianity is true. So he was starting a seminary here in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's still out there. It's called Southern Evangelical Seminary, ses.edu. Now it's all online. I went there and learned from him. And after seminary, I eventually started a ministry called crossexamined.org, where we go to colleges, high schools, churches, and we present the evidence that Christianity is true. And along the way, he and I wrote the book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

Speaker 3:
[04:51] When did you know the Lord was going to call you to this as your life's work? When did you know?

Speaker 4:
[04:57] Well, I always wanted to do it when after I read those books, I said, really, I'd really love to do this at some point. And the opportunity opened up when I met Norman Geisler. I was taking a class at McLean Bible Church in Virginia. Well, I had just gotten out of the Navy. We still lived up in the DC area. And he happened to be the weekend speaker. And he had just started this seminary in Charlotte. This was 1993. And within five months, six months of meeting him, we had moved from Charlotte to Charlotte. I mean, from the DC area to Charlotte, North Carolina. Wife, three sons, five and under, no job. We just took a step of faith to come here and learn from him and eventually started this ministry at crossexamined.org.

Speaker 3:
[05:45] What is the biggest thing that has changed as you and I have this conversation and we're recording this in March of 2026, when you started going down this road over 30 years ago in 1993, I mean, what's the biggest difference that has occurred in the culture and the audiences that you're talking to now compared to when you first started? Or over that period of time even?

Speaker 4:
[06:08] The internet and social media. We didn't have, there was no internet in 1993, not one that the public regularly used. You had to actually go to a school to learn. There was no online course. There was no online seminary. And online is good, but being in person is way better. You're learning so much more, you know, talking between classes or going to lunch with people, seeing people in the flesh and getting to know them. So that's changed the most about what we do. And then of course, social media just is where people spend so much of their time. And so the interesting thing is, Steve, that we can reach more people in one video than my mentor, Dr. Norman Geiser, reached in his entire life, you know? When you think about that, you know, some videos you reach millions of people. There's no way you can talk to millions of people in your life, right? You know, unless you're on some big network TV program or something. So the reach through social media is so much greater than it was when I first got started over 30 years ago.

Speaker 3:
[07:17] That reach works both ways, though, as you will know, right? That means the world, the flesh and the devil have more reach at the exact same time than they ever did before, right? And with every advent of new technology, right? Billy Sunday got criticized for going on radio, Billy Graham for going on TV, okay? The Internet was going to bring the enemy right into our homes. Now we're wrestling with AI, right? I've got people sending me apologetic conversations they're having with Claude and Grok and Chat GPT, right? You know, and so this is the double edged sword of what it's like out there trying to engage the world at the same time. Overall, are these things net positives, net negatives, or is it truly just down to the eye or the wielder of the beholder at that moment?

Speaker 4:
[08:06] I think in some cases it's positive, some cases it's negative. I kind of agree with Jonathan Haidt, the atheist professor from NYU, that social media has made the Gen Z and even other generations just anxious. They're the anxious generation. You know, we're not meant to get this information or disinformation overload every every two seconds. And then we're supposed to have an opinion on everything that happens in the world. And if you don't, you know, put out some sort of tweet or some sort of post about it within 10 minutes, somehow you're not virtue signaling enough and you're evil. So overall it's made us less informed. It's made us less peaceful. It's I think driven part of the polarization for our country. It puts people in boxes and it puts them in echo chambers. So they only hear what the propaganda from their side puts out. So overall, I think it's been a negative. But of course, technology by itself is amoral. It's what you do with it that makes it good or bad, right or wrong.

Speaker 3:
[09:13] Right. Let's park it here talking about AI for a second.

Speaker 4:
[09:18] Because can I say something before we get into that?

Speaker 3:
[09:21] Of course. Go ahead. You bet.

Speaker 4:
[09:22] What about AI? AI will lie to you. And I don't mean that all the time, but there is this Muslim woman in Australia that asked the question of a particular AI, did Jesus claim to be God according to the Bible? And it said no. A Canadian apologist in Canada by the name of Tim Barnett asked the same AI the same question, and the AI said yes. In other words, a lot of times the AI will learn what your preferences are and feed you what you want to hear, just to let people know that you can't always trust what it tells you.

Speaker 3:
[10:01] Wait a minute. The AI is pandering now, like our politicians, we're already got pandering AI already, right?

Speaker 4:
[10:07] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3:
[10:08] Why do you think that is? Do you think that's just a cynical ploy to get people to stay on the site longer? It's just a craven cash grab, or is there something more sinister happening that's written into that code?

Speaker 4:
[10:20] Well, gee, that's a good question. I'm not sure, but it's probably more about consumerism than anything, right? How do we get people to stay on our platform? How do we get people to make combined decisions that we want them to make? I think that has a lot to do with it.

Speaker 3:
[10:36] Well, your view of AI, can it truly remove human agency? On the other hand, is it not possible? Because as far as we know anyway, we're the only beings in the cosmos made in the likeness and image of God with souls and cognitive reasoning ability that is self-propelled. And so therefore, it can never do anything other than be a caricature of the humans and their biases and prejudices in which they coded it. It could be.

Speaker 4:
[11:03] That's it. It's got to be that. It's not sentient. It doesn't think for itself. It only thinks what you tell it to think, right? It's just a faster way of processing information.

Speaker 3:
[11:13] So can it be that? Or are you concerned that we may act as if it is sentient and outsource our agency to it, right? As opposed to, I go to, you know, in the old era, well, it's old to you and I now, but in the old era, I just went to Google, Wikipedia to collect information, and then I still had to assemble it into my own thought. I can now have the AI do all of that for me, right? And outsource my thinking and reasoning and in ways that I've never been able to as a human being before. How concerned about that, Arya, is it the other way?

Speaker 4:
[11:47] Yeah, that is a problem. And I know that there are several jobs being lost because of it, but that could just be the same buggy whip problem, right? We're not going to make buggy whips anymore. Now we got an automobile, you know? So people will adapt and find new ways to operate. But I know there are companies that are now using AI to replace people because AI doesn't talk back, AI doesn't get tired, AI doesn't complain. So there is going to be some of that, no question.

Speaker 3:
[12:18] One last AI question, then we'll get into apologetics. And I didn't intend this, but since we opened up this trap door, I'd be remiss if I didn't get somebody of your credentials take on this. There was a video going around in early 2026 that we were kind of disturbed by, and it was an AI video cleaning up the purported image of Christ on the burial shroud of Turin. And we were fine with it cleaning it up, and making it more observable. Where the three of us here on this show kind of had our Spidey sense start to tingle Frank is when they like, well, resurrected him with the AI. They animated Jesus with the AI. They cleaned up the image, and then they essentially incarnated him with the AI. They animated him with the AI, and there was just something about that that made the three of us unsettled. Were we going to, are we too paranoid? What do you think?

Speaker 4:
[13:13] Oh, that's a great question. I'm more paranoid of deep fakes of Steve Deace said this when Steve Deace didn't say it.

Speaker 3:
[13:21] Yeah, which AI can also do, by the way.

Speaker 4:
[13:23] Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm more worried about. And then what happens in a trial when evidence is faked, it's video evidence, that kind of thing, or even to bring a charge against somebody. Once it's out on the internet, there's so much information out there, much of it disinformation. People can't tell the true from the fake. That's the thing that concerns me the most. What about you?

Speaker 3:
[13:48] I agree. I agree. Listen, I think that there ultimately, the biggest problem this planet has is human nature. And that's been the case since Genesis chapter three. And I think that'll be the case since Christ returns, until Christ returns, right?

Speaker 4:
[14:03] Which means don't follow your heart without reason or moral restraint. Your heart is deceitful and wicked. Who can know it? Your heart is corrupt. Your heart wants what it wants when it wants it. Your heart is changing. So the idea that you ought to follow your heart is like perhaps the worst advice in the history of man. And yet people say it all the time. Oh, follow your heart. No, if you follow your heart without reason or moral restraint, you're going to wind up divorced, addicted, broken, alone, and probably prematurely dead. You just can't follow every impulse that comes across your mind. If you did, you're going to destroy yourself and others.

Speaker 3:
[14:39] Amen. So let's get into how human beings have changed in the time you've been doing this.

Speaker 4:
[14:45] They haven't.

Speaker 3:
[14:47] No, they have not. Yeah, they're still following. But the way that we receive knowledge, to use a fancy stained-glass window term, epistemology, I do think has greatly changed since the early 90s. And I've said this to lots of groups that I've spoken to or consulted with, that the old paradigm of persuasion, everybody agreed there was an objective truth claim. Even Ayn Rand, who was a virulent atheist and thought Christians were dopes, she agreed there had to be something objectively true, so she created her own philosophy, objectivism, in order to do so. Everybody agreed, pagan, Christian, everybody, various religions, objective truth exists. And so the arguments often were evidence-based as to why your objective truth was the right one. And then often the close would be that emotional appeal of the personal testimony. And what I see that has changed and that postmodernism, I think, has reversed the polarity and trajectory of persuasion now. That you actually have to make the emotional connection first, I think. And that's why I often talk, for example, when I go out and speak on abortion or debate the issue, my mom was pregnant at 15, thought about aborting me, that could have been me. Right away, I make the emotional connection in order to engage that audience. And then if that emotional connection is engaged, then it seems like they'll give you permission to challenge them intellectually. You agree or disagree with that. And if you agree, what do you think that means moving forward in this era?

Speaker 4:
[16:20] Yeah, I think that's a fair point for many, Steve. Although people do have different personalities, there are analytical personalities out there who are put off by emotion, right? This guy's just trying to string me along with some emotional sob story. They could think that too. But I think generally you're correct, that people tend to make up their minds by emotion and then look for facts later to back it up. And that's why propaganda is so effective, because people will be swayed by emotional stories rather than the facts. And in fact, they'll overlook the facts in order to allow that emotional story to be true of everyone. You know, we've seen a lot of this in some of our politics. There's a sob story about some lady unable to get an abortion, and oh, so we gotta make abortion okay for everybody. Or they see some federal agent who does something that appears to be a little too aggressive. Oh, they're all killers, they're all murderers. This is propaganda. It's not the way that you generalize from specifics to entire groups. In my day, we used to call that prejudice, but people now don't seem to see that. They see one example, a 15 second video, and suddenly, they painted an entire group of people by that video when they don't even have the context of that video. So that's how propaganda works, and we have to be very aware of that. But I'm one that tries to use both. I try and use stories, I try and use some emotion to drive home the facts that I want them to understand. Because facts don't care about your feelings at the end of the day. What's factually true is what's true, not what you feel is true.

Speaker 3:
[18:00] And a lot of what we think is true is outcome based, meaning we immediately begin with, will it get me the outcome I want? And then we kind of retcon it. We reverse engineer back to the premise where again, we all started with a premise. Well, hey, gravity, I may want to fly. I may have a great desire to fly. Gravity exists regardless of my desires. Now we start with the desired outcome and we reconstruct or deconstruct the previous premise or reconstruct it in favor of the outcome we want, rather than what is actually and factually true. Do you see this now more and more over the years as you continue to do apologetics ministry?

Speaker 4:
[18:36] Oh yeah, certainly. You know, reality is what remains even after you stop believing in it, okay? So like say the transgender issue, right? A poor Chloe Cole who was 16 years old thought she was in the wrong body and doctors literally gave her a double mastectomy. At 16, a couple years later, she realized that was the biggest mistake of my life. I was misinformed. Now she's suing her doctors. And as you know, she's a very eloquent de-transitioner who is trying to warn people that the solution to your psychological mismatch between your psychology and your biology is not surgery. You don't fix that problem by surgery. You can't change your biology. You can change your mind. Yet even though she thought she was a man, reality was and remains, she was always a woman. So her perception eventually realigned with the fact that she was a woman and was always a woman, despite the fact that for a while she thought she was really a woman or man in a woman's body and needed needed to have it altered. So yeah, you see that quite a bit. You see people trying to say that reality is what I think it is, when in reality, reality is what actually is, regardless of what you think about it. Look, Steve, if you were what you thought about, most men would be women and most women would be chocolate.

Speaker 3:
[20:09] So let's take now, let's segue into the meat and potatoes of the apologetic stuff from there. All right? How do you go about, particularly on a college campus with young people, how do you go about breaking through that hard wiring of my narrative is actually truth because it gives me a desired outcome, whether it's reality or not, right? You have to make more of an emotional connection with me for me to even consider your intellectual proposition. The things we just discussed. When you go on campuses, how do you break through that?

Speaker 4:
[20:41] Well, I start with usually a story either about Michael Mansour, the US Navy Seal who sacrificed himself to save his buddies. That normally draws people right in to realize how loving it was for him to sacrifice himself to save others. And I always ask people, Michael Mansour sacrificed himself for his friends. Did anyone sacrifice himself for you? And the answer is someone already has. His name is Jesus of Nazareth. But how do we know the story is actually true? And then I go into four questions to show it's true. The first is that truth does exist. I asked the question, does truth exist? Because people will say, there's no truth, right? Second question.

Speaker 3:
[21:30] How would you know that's true? That's true, by the way.

Speaker 4:
[21:32] Yeah. Well, that's what I point out, how self-defeating it is. When somebody says there's no truth, I asked them, is that true? Is it true that there's no truth? Or they say you ought not judge. I asked them, why are you judging me for judging? Or they say there's no truth in anything but science. I asked them, is that a scientific truth? Can you go in the laboratory and prove that? No, that's not a statement of science. It's a statement about science. You couldn't do science without the laws of logic. You couldn't do science without the laws of mathematics. You couldn't do science without a universe that was orderly. You can't prove that by science. You need those things to exist in order to do science. I deal with all these self-defeating statements. There are no absolutes. Are you absolutely sure? All truth is relative. Is that a relative truth? You can't know anything. How do you know that's true then? You point that out. Then you move on to the evidence for God. Does God exist or that's the question we answer. And then are miracles possible? And then ultimately, is the New Testament telling us the truth about the resurrection? Because Steve, if Jesus really predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, then Christianity is true. I mean, that's the ultimate fact. If Jesus predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, then Christianity is true. Jesus is God. Whatever God teaches is true. Or whatever God teaches, whatever Jesus teaches is true if he's God. And we point out that we have good historical evidence that Jesus taught the entire Old Testament as the word of God and he promised the New Testament. And people say, well, why trust Jesus? I just say, look, I just have a personal policy. If somebody predicts and accomplishes his own resurrection from the dead, I just trust whatever the guy says. All right. So a summary of a 500 page book. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. If you want to boil it down to two points, Steve, it's number one, God exists and number two, Jesus rose from the dead. If those two facts are true, everything else falls into place.

Speaker 3:
[23:25] All right. Let's spend some time looking at those two facts. Let's start with the first. All right. Does God exist? What's the best evidence that God exists?

Speaker 4:
[23:33] Well, I go through three arguments. I'll give you them very quickly. The first is the argument for the beginning of the universe known as the cosmological argument. Even atheists today, Steve, are admitting that space, time and matter had a beginning out of nothing. If that's the case, and I say even atheists like Stephen Hawking, who's since passed on, but Hawking famously said almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang. If that really is true, what could have caused space, time and matter to have a beginning out of nothing? Only something outside of space, time and matter, right? In other words, only something spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful to create the universe out of nothing. Personal in order to choose to create, and also intelligent to have a mind to make a choice. So Steve, I always ask audiences this question. When you think about a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, who do you think of? God. They always say God, but then they'll say, well, how do you know it's the Christian God, Frank? And my answer is we don't. Yet this could be Allah or some other theistic or deistic God that created the universe out of nothing. But if we keep looking at the evidence and we go to that second fact, did Jesus rise from the dead? We see that the evidence shows that he really did. Then we can go back to the beginning of the universe and say the same being that walked out of the tomb 1,993 years ago in his human nature is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing. So you don't get all the way to Jesus from what we call the cosmological argument, but you get six attributes of a being that could be the God of the Bible from one argument. That's the first argument. The second argument is the argument from design known as the teleological argument. There are two aspects to that argument. One is the universe appears to be designed. And second is that life appears to be designed. And we can spend some time on that if you want. But let me just go on to the third argument. That's the moral argument, which might be the most relevant today for people, particularly on a college campus, because everything they do has something to do with morality. They're screaming for justice on college campuses. Well, if there is no God, there is no justice, why? Because there is no standard of rightness. If there is no standard of rightness, then you can't say anything's wrong or evil. You can't say anyone has any rights. It would just be your opinion. There's gotta be a fixed standard beyond us that we're obligated to obey for any right or wrong to exist and for any rights to exist, any purpose of life to exist. So the evidence shows that there is a standard of rightness out there. I mean, we know that, say for example, murder is wrong and rape is wrong. If that's the case, there must be a standard beyond us that we're obligated to obey that says murder is wrong and rape is wrong and say love is right. That standard is what we mean by God's nature. If God doesn't exist, you couldn't even justify why murder is wrong or why rape is wrong or why slavery is wrong. Any of these things can't be wrong unless there's a standard of right. So from those three arguments, we call the cosmological, teleological and moral arguments, when you unpack them, Steve, you can conclude without reference to the Bible that there's a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause who created all things, who is moral and sustains all things. And you can show that without any reference to any religious book.

Speaker 3:
[27:10] That'll preach right there, folks. That's why he's doing this for a living. About a decade ago, Frank, Amy and I went out to New York City for our anniversary. And we wanted to visit the Museum of Natural History because our whole family loved the night at the museum films. Right? Right. And so we go into the cosmology, astronomy section of the Museum of Natural History there, where Neil deGrasse Tyson was the curator. I don't know if he still is. He was back then. And you walk in and there's a display right at the beginning of the Big Bang. And I took a picture of it. It's still on my phone for the last 10 years. And right there on the display at the Museum of Natural History, it says, the universe has a beginning. No one knows when or no one knows why, is what it says. And I walked out of there thinking, so you guys cannot answer by your own admission. You can't even supply an answer. You're not even willing. It might be a crappy answer. You're not even willing to supply an answer to the two most important questions of all of existence. Okay? And yet, from here on, you're going to tell us how to run our lives and live our lives and conduct our culture and civilization. And yet, you're not even going to proffer an answer, attempt an answer at the two most important questions in all of existence. Why would we listen to you when you've got nothing on the stuff we really care the most about?

Speaker 4:
[28:27] You know what Hawking's answer was to that, Steve? Hawking, last book he wrote, Grand Design. Here's what it says on page 181. This is a quote. He's an atheist. He said, because there's a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing. Unquote. Hello, McFly.

Speaker 3:
[28:49] Yeah, how?

Speaker 4:
[28:50] What?

Speaker 3:
[28:50] Yeah, how?

Speaker 4:
[28:51] What? Wait, wait, this is why John Lennox, the esteemed mathematician and philosopher from Oxford University, also happens to be a Christian, said this after he read that by Hawking. He said, when brilliant scientists talk nonsense, it's still nonsense.

Speaker 3:
[29:10] We are going to come back more with Frank Turek in a moment. We're going to get into now number two, evidences for the resurrection next day too. The Steve Deace Show. But we are brought to you today by My Miracle Made Sheets, which you know I absolutely love. Silver infused fabrics inspired by NASA that regulate your temperature all night long, like right now with the change of seasons where it gets cool overnight and warm during the day. And then that same fabric also repels 99.9% of the bacteria off your sheets as well. So upgrade your sleep. Go to trimiracle.com/deace to Try Miracle Made Sheets today. You're gonna save over 40% when you use my promo code Deace. And you'll get an extra free three piece towel set and an additional 20% off with that amazing gift with the code Deace, as well as their 30 day money back guarantee, which you won't need cause you're gonna love it. trimiracle.com/deacecodedeace at checkout. That's trimiracle.com/deace for 40% off code Deace for extra savings as well. We are brought to you right now though by Tacoviz. They've got boots for the season, any season, weddings, concerts, outdoor festivals, work events, whatever, ready for anything boots for your weekend adventures. You can dress up or dress down with your boots that go from festival to dinner to no problem. And they're timeless boot silhouettes that fit every single occasion from premium apparel to elevated leather goods as well, like wallets, belts and more. Everything at Tacoviz is crafted with the same attention to detail and timeless style. So reset your wardrobe with craftsmanship you can see and feel the moment that you put it on. Explore the full range of boots, denim and performance shirting in-store or online and get 10% off at tacoviz.com/steve, cecovas.com for tacoviz.com/steve. And save 10% off when you do at tacoviz.com/steve. See site for details, Tacoviz, point your toes west. All right, back here on a special Evergreen Edition, and we are challenging you, do you have enough faith to be an atheist? With Frank Turek, one of the great apologists and theologians we have in America today. So we discussed already, Frank, the evidences for why God exists. Let's get into the, and then we left it at, hey, we don't know right now yet, that that God, that creator, that all those characteristics and traits you noted that are embedded into the creation, and therefore kind of embedded into our own, you know, identities as human beings, we don't yet know that it's the Christian God, right? And so Paul himself says in the New Testament, listen, if the resurrection is not true, then move on. We're all just wasting our time here and don't read the rest of the New Testament. There's just nothing here that matters. My letter is nothing. I mean, this is a complete farce and scam of a religion, right? And so if the whole thing hinges on a historical fact being true or not, did God supernaturally intervene into human history to raise a dead man to life, right? That's what the whole thing hinges on. What's the best evidences for that?

Speaker 4:
[32:37] Well, first of all, let's go back to the God question for a second. There can't be a miracle unless God exists. Now, many scientists today have philosophically ruled out miracles. And so it doesn't matter how much evidence you provide for something like a resurrection. They're always going to say, well, it's impossible because miracles don't occur. And in fact, they're arguing in a circle. And when people say they don't believe in miracles, what I say to them, Steve, is you're living in a miracle. This universe is a miracle. The greatest miracle in the Bible is not the resurrection. The greatest miracle in the Bible is the first verse. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. If that verse is true, Steve, every other verse is at least possible because if God can create the universe out of nothing, then he can do whatever he wants. It's not logically impossible inside the universe. And even atheists are admitting the universe at a beginning. I mean, I've mentioned Hawking, you mentioned Neil deGrasse Tyson in the Natural History Museum. They're admitting that the universe had a beginning. They just don't know who did it. But as we mentioned earlier, it seems very rational to say that if space, time and matter had a beginning, it's gotta be at least a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, intelligent cause, which could be the God of the Bible. So you can't look at historical data from New Testament documents by ruling out the possibility that they're telling the truth, but too many so-called scholars do that. They rule it out before they look at the evidence. That's a philosophical presupposition. They're not getting their conclusion from the evidence. Their conclusion is preloaded into their method where they say, well, we know miracles don't occur, therefore it's gotta be something other than a resurrection.

Speaker 3:
[34:26] In other words, they don't want it to be true. And there's no amount of evidence you could present that would change their minds, right? And to me, that's kind of when the world is divided into sheep and to wolves. And tell me what you think is, I explained to our audience, the sheep just don't know, the wolf doesn't want to know. And that's kind of the difference how I define it. But what do you say?

Speaker 4:
[34:48] You know, in fact, Steve, that's the question I ask people who are not believers on college campuses all the time. The question goes like this. If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian? And I've had atheists stand at the microphone in front of hundreds of people and say, no, no, wait, you claim to be rational. You claim to be someone reasonable. How is it reasonable that you wouldn't believe something that turned out to be true? Because it's not a matter of reason. It's not a head problem, it's a heart problem. They don't want it to be true. They don't want there to be God because they want to be God over their own lives. They're not on a truth quest or on a happiness quest. And they're just going to believe whatever they think is going to make them happy. Now here's the problem. You can make yourself happy over the short term, doing a lot of fun, but ultimately sinful and selfish things. But if you try that long enough, it's going to wind up in disaster. Everyone over 40 knows what I'm talking about. If you say, I'm just going to live for me all the time. No, you're not. What's going to happen to your relationships? You're going to blow everything up. You can't just live for you. You can't live in a selfish situation the entire, your entire life. If you do, you're going to wind up alone. You're going to wind up broken, probably prematurely dead. If you want contentment, you got to go straight through truth and Jesus is the truth. But a lot of us don't want that. That's why I always ask people who are not Christians, if Christianity really were true, if God really did exist, Jesus really did rise from the dead and that he came to pay your punishment for you. And by trusting in him, you're not only forgiven, but given his righteousness. If all that was true, would you trust in him? And a lot of times the answer is no. If the answer is no, let's just go have pizza. There's no reason to even talk about it.

Speaker 3:
[36:39] Let's assume that there's at least one person in this audience whose heart is receptive to this idea. So, what are the best evidences to that person that this first century carpenter named Yeshua was crucified and then rose from the dead, thus proving that he was God incarnate? What's the best evidences for this?

Speaker 4:
[37:01] Well, we have a chapter, and I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, called The Top Ten Reasons We Know the New Testament, Writers Told the Truth. Of course, we don't have time for ten, okay? Let me just give you a couple that are personally persuasive to me. First of all, these people were eyewitnesses. They proved their eyewitnesses in several different ways. They know stuff only an eyewitness would know. And in fact, in the book, we list 84 details that the Book of Acts lists that only an eyewitness would know. We've list 59 from the Gospel of John, only an eyewitness could know. They claim to be eyewitnesses, of course too. That doesn't prove they are just by claiming it, but they put all sorts of details in the text that they couldn't have known unless they were there. Not just historical details, but topographical details, geographical details. They get weather patterns right, they get local rulers in obscure towns right, they get all the Herod's right, all the Roman rulers right. Do you know, Steve, that the New Testament documents contain 37 people that have been confirmed by archeology and or other writings of the time. And some of those people are prominent people related to Jesus' crucifixion. In fact, the following people have been discovered in archeology that are all associated with Jesus' crucifixion. Jesus himself has been found in archeology. Peter found in archeology. Pilate found in archeology. Herod found in archeology. Simon of Cyrene, the guy that carried Jesus' cross, he's been found in archeology. His name was found on an ossuary, a burial box that the Jews used from about 20 BC to 70 AD. They would, after someone had died a year later, they'd go into the tomb, take the bones and put them in an ossuary, a burial box, a limestone burial box. And Simon of Cyrene's son, that box has been found. And on the side of it, it says Alexander's son of Simon of Cyrene. Cyrene was what we would call Libya today. How many people in the first century do you think lived in Jerusalem who had a father named Simon and his name was Alexander and his father was from Cyrene? Not many. This is probably the Simon of Cyrene. Also Caiaphas, the high priest, his burial box has been found. The guy that sentenced Jesus to die. Annis, his tomb has been found. He's the other high priest that was at the trial. We found his tomb. I was just in his tomb last October in Israel. Who am I leaving out? I may have left somebody out. Anyway, there's like seven of these people that have been discovered in archaeology that are associated with Jesus's crucifixion and even skeptics like Bart Ehrman from UNC Chapel Hill. He's an atheist slash agnostic New Testament scholar. He said, it's an established fact Jesus was crucified. The question is, what was he resurrected? That's the more important fact. We can get into that here in a minute if you want.

Speaker 3:
[40:09] Let's get into it then. Was he resurrected?

Speaker 4:
[40:12] Well, first of all, a lot of people will say, well, I can't trust the New Testament documents because those are Christian sources. Let me put a reply to that by saying this. There are no Christian sources in the Bible. They're all Jewish sources. Yeah, they became Christians, but all the writers of the New Testament, even Luke now, scholars are saying was Jewish. All the writers of the New Testament, eight or nine depended upon who wrote Hebrews. They're all Jews. Steve, there are two things Jews didn't believe in the first century. They didn't believe a man could claim to be God. That was blasphemy. Number two, they didn't think one guy would rise from the dead. In the middle of time, we'd all rise from the dead at the end of time because that's what Isaiah and Daniel have said. But here they are, these pious Jews who thought they were God's chosen people, who suddenly, virtually overnight, dispense with their chosen people theology and say, a man did claim to be God. His name is Jesus of Nazareth and he did rise from the dead and we're going to follow him to the death. Why would Jews do this, Steve? Why would they do this?

Speaker 3:
[41:31] A lot of personal wealth, right? I mean, there was a lot of money to be made amongst the Jewish community for saying this Yeshua guy was Messiah, right?

Speaker 4:
[41:38] Our mutual friend, Detective J. Warner Wallace says this whenever he finds a body that he knows has been murdered, he's a cold case homicide detective. He says, look, when I know somebody's been murdered, I don't have to track down 1000 motivations why that guy is murdered. That guy was murdered for one or more of these three reasons. There was either a sex issue, a money issue or a power issue. Sex money or power are the three things that drive people to murder. In fact, they're the same three things that drive any of us to sin. Why? Because sex, money and power are good things. The problem is they're so good, we'll often take shortcuts to get them, which is what we call sin. Anyway, Jim says, and by the way, he's also written a book on this. He's used his homicide skills to investigate the greatest homicide of all time, the homicide of Jesus. It's called Cold Case Christianity. Jim says, if you're gonna say the New Testament writers, they're Jews, have invented all this, you gotta find one or more of those three motivators. So let's take a look. Steve, did the New Testament writers suddenly get real popular with the ladies for saying Jesus had resurrected from the dead?

Speaker 3:
[42:48] No, no. And in fact, they were actually turning certain kinds of ladies into pious ones. They probably weren't that popular with the guys either, Frank, if we're being honest.

Speaker 4:
[42:58] That's right. Yeah. And they weren't real popular by saying, you can't divorce your wife. Right, right.

Speaker 3:
[43:03] These are all very winning messages.

Speaker 4:
[43:05] Another woman with lust, you're already a sinner. They're not making this up, right? This is not convenient, okay? So they didn't get sex. Did they get money? No, no, no. They weren't 21st century prosperity gospel preachers, okay? Number three, did they get power?

Speaker 3:
[43:21] No, I mean, they were almost all martyred in the most vicious ways you could possibly imagine for what they were doing.

Speaker 4:
[43:26] They got the opposite of power. They got persecuted. I mean, Paul had power when he was persecuting the church. As soon as he converts from Saul to Paul, he is the one persecuted. They didn't get sex, they didn't get money, they didn't get power. There's no motive to make this up. Now people will ask me, are there any non-Christian writers that talk about this? And I say, yes, there are. We have them all in a chapter and I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. But the question often has an illicit assumption under it, Steve. And here's the illicit assumption. The illicit assumption is you can't trust the New Testament writers because they're biased. If you think about that for more than five seconds, you realize how stupid that is. For the reasons we just went through. If anybody was biased against believing in the resurrection, it was the New Testament writers. Why? Because they got beaten, tortured and killed for saying it happened. It went against their entire belief system. This is not something they wish to be true. It's something they knew was true because they witnessed it, but they didn't want it to be true from a temporal perspective. They didn't get sex. They didn't get money. They didn't get power. They got abused. And so I'd like to say to people this, the New Testament writers did not create the resurrection. The resurrection created the New Testament writers. You would not have evidence of, or you would not have documents written in the first century by Jews claiming a man claimed to be God and then rose from the dead, unless a man really did claim to be God and really did rise from the dead. In fact, sometimes they say it this way that, that the resurrection and Christianity would be true if the Bible never existed. And people go, well, how can that be? Do you realize there were thousands of Christians before a line of the New Testament was ever written? Not because they read about it in a book. It's because they witnessed the resurrected Jesus himself. You see, Christianity did not begin with a book. Christianity began with an event, the resurrection. There would be no book or no books that we put under one binding we now call the Bible. There would be no New Testament series of books unless Jesus really did rise from the dead because there's no motivation to make this up. There was complete pain and suffering that they got for saying this was true. So there's no motivation to make it up.

Speaker 3:
[46:08] It's always interesting to me. First of all, Pliny, Josephus, all these extra biblical sources, historical sources. It's funny. No one cares what these guys have to literally think about anything anymore, except for scholars in their respective fields. Their work was actually elevated by Christianity. Many of us go back and want to know who these people are because they do address Christianity. And then we found out what other historical issues of antiquity that they wrote about at the time. So I've always found that to be interesting. And then what's your counter narrative then? I mean, what would be the counter narrative for why Jewish guys changed the way they went to church? What day they went to church? Decided to go ahead and start commiserating with a bunch of Gentile pagans they were commanded to stay away from for the previous 1500 years as a people. Why did they all willingly go to their death? Why did human civilizations in the entire Western hemisphere change the way we conduct even time exercises fundamentally as societies? I mean, what would be the possible counter narrative for this other than the resurrection? Why would all these things have occurred if it's not true?

Speaker 4:
[47:14] Yeah, and why would Jesus of Nazareth become the most influential human being in history if the resurrection was not true? How did this obscure itinerant preacher from a remote part of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago become the center of the human race if A, he was fictitious, or B, he wasn't fictitious, but just somebody who just preached some nice stories and then died? He wouldn't be. I mean, to say, I mean, there's some Jesus mythicists out there who say he never existed. Steve, do you think that 2,000 years from now, if the universe is still here, that 2,000 years from now, the center of human history is going to be some fictitious character, like say, Luke Skywalker?

Speaker 3:
[48:02] No.

Speaker 4:
[48:02] Do you think people, the 2,000 years from now, Todd, don't answer that. Luke Skywalker.

Speaker 3:
[48:08] I'll die for Luke. I will die for Luke Skywalker.

Speaker 4:
[48:13] But that's what people are asking us to believe about Jesus. They're mythicists. You know, how does this happen?

Speaker 3:
[48:18] All right. When we come back, how do we know we can trust the Bible? All right. What are some of the more challenging questions Frank's ever gotten? We'll get to that and more in our last segment with Frank. We're brought to you by Fast Growing Trees. Did you know they are America's largest and also most trusted online nursery? That's why they've got over 2 million customers with thousands of trees and plants, not just for your spring planting season, but interior home decorating season as well. Their Alive and Thrive Guarantee promises you that your plants arrive happy and healthy. And if you've got no green thumb, that's okay. They've got quality plants you can count on and ongoing support from trained plant experts as well. That'll help you choose the right plants and teach you how to care for them every single step of the way. Right now, you've got a great opportunity here to get started. 20% off your first purchase when you go to Fast Growing Trees. I mean, this time of year, they got up to half off on select plants already. We'll take 20% off that already low price with your first purchase at fastgrowingtrees.com code Deace at checkout for that extra discount. fastgrowingtrees.com code Deace for 20% off your first purchase. All right, back here with Hour Two on a special evergreen edition of the Steve Deace Show here. I am Steve Deace, he's Todd Urz, and he's Aaron McIntyre. Gonna be joined again in a moment by Frank Turek, and he does a lot of outstanding work on Cross Examined. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, author, speaker all over the country. But first, don't forget that you can let us know what you think about what we think via the stevedace.com inbox by emailing us, steve at stevedace.com, D-E-A-C-E. Like us on Facebook, me, we and Gab. Follow me at stevedace.com on X, Instagram, and TikTok. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at Deace Show there. And then finally, you can hit Subscribe, or if you're on Apple iTunes, Follow if you're a podcast listener. And that makes sure that every time we do one of these new episodes, you can be assured that it's right there in your podcast feed. And tens of thousands of you have left us five star reviews. Keep those coming. We appreciate each and every one. So this is our final segment with Frank, and then we'll be joined at the bottom of the hour for Todd and Aaron to get kind of their reaction to what they've heard here over the last 90 minutes. So, Frank, how then... All right, so we've talked about and given compelling reasons why there is a God, why the resurrection of Christ happened. All right. So then how can we trust the Bible from here? You admitted even a few minutes ago, we don't know who wrote the Book of Hebrews, for example. All right. Catholics have what, like a half dozen books that we don't have on the Protestant side. I read Dan Brown's book that it came down to one vote in the Council of Nicaea about the canon, they took out all this stuff about Mary Magdalene and everything else that she was really married to Jesus and all these other things, right? And Jesus pops up in the Koran and in some other religious text as well. So how do we know and how can we trust the biblical narrative itself?

Speaker 4:
[51:36] Well, there's several different ways of doing it. Here's the way I choose to do it. It's the fastest way, Steve. The fastest way is to show that historically, Jesus predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead. If that's the case, then that means Jesus is God, and whatever God teaches is true. Jesus taught the entire Old Testament as the word of God, and he promised the New Testament. You can show that through historical evidence, okay? So you can also look at Old Testament manuscript. You can look at Old Testament archeology. We've just gone through a 26-hour series on our TV show called Digging Up the Bible. It's also on our website, crossexamined.org, where we cover all the major archeological discoveries from both the Old and the New Testaments. There's well, well over 120 or 130 people that have been, that are in the Bible that are actually discovered in archeology. People don't realize that. This is an historical text. It's not an invented text. But there are other ways of looking at, say, the New Testament narrative in particular, that shows me that these guys are not making it up. We said in the last session, the last segment that if they're going to invent something, they need a motivator like sex, money or power. They didn't have any of those motivators, but they also did other things that show them they're not making up the text. And that includes what historians call embarrassing testimony. What's embarrassing testimony? Embarrassing testimony is the kind of testimony that embarrasses the author or authors. And historians know that if there's embarrassing testimony in the text, it's probably true. Why? Because you're not going to invent things that make yourself look bad. You might invent things that make yourself look good, but you won't invent things that make yourself look bad. So Steve, let me ask you a question. Have you ever lied to make yourself look good?

Speaker 3:
[53:38] Unfortunately, I have, yes.

Speaker 4:
[53:40] I always ask audiences that question. I ask them to raise their hand. For people that don't raise their hand, I say to them-

Speaker 3:
[53:46] You just did it.

Speaker 4:
[53:47] Yeah, I say to them, if you don't have your hand up right now, you're lying to make yourself look good.

Speaker 3:
[53:51] Exactly.

Speaker 4:
[53:52] And it's not working, right? Yes. We will lie to make ourselves look good. We will not lie to make ourselves look bad, to embarrass ourselves. Not normally anyway, right? Well, look at the New Testament. Let's just look at the New Testament documents. Here are some just embarrassing things about the New Testament. First of all, the disciples themselves are completely dim-witted. Like how many times do they say, we didn't know what Jesus was talking about. We didn't know what he meant, right? We were perplexed. In fact, they don't even understand his mission until he's already ascended to heaven after the resurrection. And then they finally get it, right? Peter, their leader is called Satan by Jesus. Do you think they invented this? I mean-

Speaker 3:
[54:37] Granted, it's a weird pet name, granted.

Speaker 4:
[54:39] What's that?

Speaker 3:
[54:40] Granted, that is a weird pet name. I'll grant you that point. Yeah, that's a weird one. Yes.

Speaker 4:
[54:43] Yeah, yeah. Get behind me, Satan. I mean, Mark, if Mark were to say to Peter, hey Pete, I'm gonna make this a real interesting story. I'm gonna have the Lord call you Satan. What do you think Peter would have said? Have him call you Satan, man. I'm the leader here. That's right. This is not looking good. And then Peter says, Lord, I'll never deny you. What does he wind up doing? He denies him three times. This is embarrassing. And then at the crucifixion, Steve, all of the disciples, with the exception of one, they all run away. This is like a Monty Python movie. Run away. They all run away. And who are the brave ones? Who are the brave ones? The women.

Speaker 3:
[55:23] The women are, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[55:25] Yeah. The women are the brave ones. Now who wrote the New Testament documents down? Men. Now what man is going to invent that he was hiding for fear of the Jews, why the women went down, discovered the empty tomb, right? No man is going to invent that.

Speaker 3:
[55:41] Particularly in that era. In this era, in this era, the men might claim to be those women, Frank, but in that era, it would have never happened. You're correct. Yes.

Speaker 4:
[55:49] Yeah, that's right. That's right. And it was also embarrassing to have the women be the first witnesses because in that culture, a woman's testimony was not considered on par with that of a man. So if you're making up the New Testament story and you want it to be credible, you wouldn't even mention the women. But all four Gospels say the women were the first witnesses, which is telling us that they really were the first witnesses. I actually had a woman, Steve, come up to me once after I was, I said this at a university. She said, I know why Jesus appeared to the women first. And I said, why? And she said, because he wanted to get the story out.

Speaker 3:
[56:29] There's no way they weren't going to spill that tea, right? Exactly. Yes.

Speaker 4:
[56:33] I said, that is an excellent point. I had not thought of that. I always ask ladies, when your man comes home from work, does he say much? There could have been a nuclear explosion.

Speaker 3:
[56:43] My wife asked me details about guys I've been friends with for 20 years. I have no idea with those details. I've never asked. I've never cared to. I don't care. Yeah. And she's like, how are you his friend? He goes, he doesn't know any of this stuff about me, that that's exactly why we are friends, because we don't waste our time with these stupid details. That's why we're friends. Yes.

Speaker 4:
[57:04] I think I'm thinking of Brian Regan, who talks about going golf with a buddy. He's out there for five hours. His wife, he comes home and the wife says to him, so how's Gary? Oh, he's doing pretty good. Well, is he dating anyone? How would I know? You're with him for five hours? You didn't ask me if he was dating anyone? It just didn't come up.

Speaker 3:
[57:26] Nope.

Speaker 4:
[57:27] Hey, Gary, you're about 150 out. Are you dating anyone?

Speaker 3:
[57:31] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, see, I would say the embarrassing testimony thing applies to the Old Testament thing, too. When my now son-in-law wanted to marry my daughter, my oldest daughter, she's like, well, you got to know Jesus before we're even going to talk about that. So they start studying the Bible together. And he had never studied it at all. And so he's doing like private Bible time, and he calls her up one day in the middle of Genesis, and he's like, did you know this stuff was in here? I mean, you've got a guy buying his daughter-in-law as a prostitute. I mean, he's like reading all these salacious stories in the Old Hills. I was not told this was in here. This is not what I expected this to be, right? I expected this to be a lot of high-minded, thee, thou, religious assertions and philosophical meanderings. It was not what he expected it to be whatsoever at all.

Speaker 4:
[58:27] Oh, and that's why Dennis Prager said this. The reason I know the Old Testament is true is because no people group would ever invent such an embarrassing history of themselves.

Speaker 3:
[58:35] Yes, no people group would automatically say, guys, we blew it, literally every time. We blew it every single time. We were never right. No one would volunteer that, right?

Speaker 4:
[58:45] That's right. God has to dope slap us again.

Speaker 3:
[58:48] Again, for hundreds of years, literally. All right, let's get in for a second here to some of the contemporary debates that are happening right now, okay? We have, are you seeing practically when you're on campuses? Are you seeing the influx of these young men to the faith that we're kind of hearing anecdotally about? Number one, are you seeing this in person? Are you seeing, because I know you did a lot of these events with Charlie. We'll talk about that here towards the end of our conversation. But are you seeing that maybe there is an awakening of the young men that is anecdotally being discussed online? Are you seeing it?

Speaker 4:
[59:23] Yeah, I think, and what has shifted since Charlie and we did eight or nine events right after Charlie was murdered. They were already scheduled. I think we added one or two. And the reason we did them is because we knew that Charlie would want us to do them and people were hurting. So it was a good opportunity to try and minister to people. And what I have noticed since Charlie's murder was that the questions have shifted from skepticism more to evangelism. What I mean by that is instead of, I mean, we still get some skeptical questions, but we're getting fewer, how do you even know God exists? Or what about this objection or that objection? We're getting more questions like, how do I help my roommate become a Christian? So there is a shift there. The crowds are bigger now. I'm praying that this is a true revival. I don't know if it is, but I think there have been signs of it. And yes, I think men are more engaged now than they were. In fact, this is one of the last things Charlie and I spoke about two nights before he was murdered. We went on one of our walks there in Phoenix at night just to talk about issues. And one of the issues he was struggling with is how does he get his generation to embrace marriage? Because according to polls right after the last election, Trump voting men, the number one goal they had in life was to get married and have kids. It was like number five for Trump voting women. And for Harris voting women, it was like number 12 out of 13. And so how could he encourage women to become more interested in marriage and family? The men already appeared to be moving in that direction.

Speaker 3:
[61:15] I want to get back to that, but I just recalled, I promised a question I need to ask. What is the most challenging question you have been asked? The one that made you think, I might have to get back to you on that, or I got to do a little more homework on that one.

Speaker 4:
[61:28] Most of the questions you hear are in one of four categories. And there aren't a lot of novel questions, to tell you the truth. And they're on our app, the cross-examined app, two words in the app store. They're basically in these four categories that begin with the letter E. Evil, evolution, eternity, and ethics. Evil, evolution, eternity, and ethics. So what would be an evil, a classic evil question? If there's a good God, why is there evil? Why did God allow Charlie to be murdered? Why doesn't a good God stop evil, okay? That's a question that comes up all the time, of course. Evolution, if evolution is true, does that mean Christianity is false? Those kinds of questions. Eternity, if there is a good God, why isn't everybody saved? If he wants all people to be saved, then why doesn't he save everybody? Why did he create a universe where some people would go to hell? What about hell itself? Is hell fair? What about those who have never heard? Those types of questions. And then ethics covers a lot of ground. You know, why did God kill the Canaanites in the Old Testament? Does the Bible condone slavery? What does God have against same-sex behavior? Those kinds of questions. And some of those questions overlap. A question like, why did God kill the Canaanites is not just an ethical question, it's also an evil question, right? So some of them overlap.

Speaker 3:
[63:04] Give us your best answer to all four of those. Like your pithiest best answer to those four.

Speaker 4:
[63:11] The fastest issue when if God, why evil is evil does not disprove God. Evil may prove there's a devil out there, but it can't disprove God because there'd be no such thing as evil unless there was good and there'd be no such thing as good unless God existed.

Speaker 3:
[63:25] Right. What's good and evil in the animal phylum? What is it? What's good and evil between a lion and an antelope? What's good and evil between them? Or a shark and a crawfish?

Speaker 4:
[63:43] Yeah. There's no good and evil. There's just nature. But if something is evil, that means there's something that's good. And if there's something that's good, in order for it to be objectively good, it must exist outside of our opinion. It must be grounded in a mind beyond us. That mind is what we mean by God and his nature is righteousness. So evil is a real thing. It's just a lack in a good thing. Evil is like cancer. If you take all the cancer out of a good body, you got a better body. What happens if you take all the body out of the cancer? You got nothing. Doesn't exist on its own. Evil is like rust in a car. If you take all the rust out of a car, you got a better car. What happens if you take all the car out of the rust? You got a pinto. You gotta be old enough for that joke.

Speaker 3:
[64:29] I got that one. I'm barely old enough, barely old enough, but I do remember those, yes.

Speaker 4:
[64:34] So evil doesn't exist on its own. It exists as a lack in a good thing. In fact, even our words describe this, like we call something unjust or immoral or not right. All those words or phrases imply a negation. Evil is, in fact, we can put it this way, evil is degrading a good thing. So God creates something good, we human beings degrade it, right? Say we pollute, we're degrading a good thing. We punch somebody, we're degrading the image of God. We curse somebody, we're degrading the image of God. We take somebody's life, we're ending someone's life. We are degrading a good thing. That's what evil is. It's not a thing in itself. The only way evil can exist is if good exists, because evil is a parasite that lives in good. So evil does not disprove God. Now you can ask questions, why does God allow evil? That's another question. And the short answer is, because we have free will, and if we have free will, then it allows us to love. The problem is this free will also allows us to do evil. And what Christianity is, it's the answer to the problem of evil. Do you know that we wouldn't need Jesus if we had never sinned? The reason we need Jesus to rescue us is because we allowed evil to enter the world, and then he had to come into this world to save us ultimately from the evil that we had done, because God, as an infinitely just God, has to punish sin. He's also infinitely loving, so he doesn't want to punish sin. So what does he do? He takes our punishment upon himself by coming into this universe, living the perfect life in our place, and allowing us, the creatures that rebelled against him, to torture and kill him, so he could remain just by taking our punishment upon himself. And then when you trust in him, you're not only forgiven, but given his righteousness. So the answer to the problem of evil is Christianity.

Speaker 3:
[66:31] I like to say, there's only one world view that has sufficient answers for why the world is the way it is, why we are the way we are, and what can be done about it. And that's the biblical world view. You may not like those answers. You may not like them, but it is the only world view that has sufficient answers to those questions.

Speaker 4:
[66:51] Yes, we might say technically it's the only world view that has the adequate explanatory power and scope to deal with all of these problems. And the historical evidence to show that the revelation we call the Bible is actually true.

Speaker 3:
[67:09] Let's do one more of your E's, evolution.

Speaker 4:
[67:11] Yeah. Okay, evolution actually is on the ropes right now, Steve. Macrorevolution, the idea that we all evolved from the first one-celled creature without intelligent intervention. You know, you've probably heard from the goo to you via the zoo. Even Darwinists are admitting that the theory does not work. In fact, 10 years ago, back in 2016, they at the Royal Society of London, the August Scientific Affiliation that had members like Isaac Newton way back when, they had a conference back in November of 2016 that basically said, the current theory of macroevolution doesn't work. We need a new naturalistic theory. They gathered, they complained about it, but they haven't come up with a new theory. Because there isn't one, Steve, we didn't evolve, okay? Microevolution is true, but macroevolution is not. We see adaptation within a type. We don't see adaptations crossing types. And there are four, there's more than this. Let me just give you four basic reasons why it's impossible.

Speaker 3:
[68:09] Can you describe what you're saying? Can we define this for the average layman, pardon me? We see microevolution within fish. We don't see bears become fish. Is that kind of a simplification of what you're saying, right? Okay.

Speaker 4:
[68:22] Yeah, we see beak sizes in finches change. That's what Darwin noted, but it changed with the weather. And all that changed was the proportion of big beak finches to small beak finches because the weather dictated how big of a beak you needed to have in order to go get seed into ground. If you had a lot of rain, the ground is soft. You wouldn't need as big of a beak, as hard of a beak. But if you had a drought situation, you'd need a stronger beak to get seed out of the ground. And so in a drought, the larger beak finches would predominate. In a rainy season, the smaller beak finches would dominate. But you start with finches, you end with finches. The origin of finches is never explained. That's what needs to be explained. So we say it this way. Natural selection may help explain the survival of a species, but not the arrival of a species. And so here are four real quick ways of looking at the problems with macroevolution. LIFE, L-I-F-E. The L stands for the fact that there are genetic limits to change. Even breeders, they can breed all sorts of dogs, but they can't break the genus of dogs. We're using all of our intelligence, and we can't create a new type of creature. If using all of our intelligence, we can't create a new type of creature, so why do we expect a non-intelligent process to be able to do so? We shouldn't, okay? The I in life stands for the fact that there's information found in every living thing. Every one of your 40 trillion cells has a message, 3.2 billion letters long, Steve, DNA, right? Now, Steve, if you're walking along the beach and you see in the sand John Loves Mary, what do you assume made that message?

Speaker 3:
[70:11] The waves, the crabs came out of the water and just may have randomly evolved over a period of billions of years and just happened to come into something that is intelligible, right?

Speaker 4:
[70:20] Yeah, no, you're going to say it's got to be an intelligent being. Well, if John Loves Mary, which has what? 15 letters maybe, requires intelligence. How about a message 3.2 billion letters long?

Speaker 3:
[70:29] That requires intelligence. Or a human body with 2 trillion cells for that matter.

Speaker 4:
[70:33] Yeah, it's strange credulity to say that this happened by natural forces, okay? The F in life stands for the fossil record, which does not comport with gradualism. According to the Cambrian explosion 500 and something million years ago, according to their dating, most of the major body plans, the phyla just appear spontaneously in the fossil record, no fossil precursors. Even Richard Dawkins, the famed atheist evolutionist said, it's almost like they were just planted there. Yeah, they were created, okay? Fully formed. And the E in life stands for something known as epigenetic information. This is the, say, the fleshy part of a cell, not the DNA, not the code. You can't change the fleshy part, the structure of a cell by mutating the DNA, which is what the Darwinian theory of macroevolution is. If we mutate DNA long enough, we'll get a new body plan. That's been discovered to be not true. You can mutate DNA from now till doomsday, you'll never get a new body plan. You can't change the epigenetic information, the structure of a cell by mutating DNA. So gradualism is false according to the Darwinian theory. On the other hand, we can say, not only do we show that macroevolution isn't true, there's positive empirically verifiable evidence for intelligence, like a code. Wherever I see a code, there has to be a coder. If there's a program, there's gotta be a programmer. If there's a message, there has to be a mind. In other words, Steve, when we say that intelligence was required for life, we're not arguing from what we don't know. It's not a God of the gaps argument. Oh, I just don't know who did this, so let me plug God into the gap of my knowledge. No, we're not arguing for what we don't know. We're arguing from what we do know. When we see a message, we know there has to be a mind. When we see a code, there has to be a coder. When we see a program, there's gotta be a programmer. And by the way, Steve, this is how we know God exists. When someone asks you, how do you know that God exists? I think you ought to say this. I know God exists by his effects. If there's a creation, that's the effect. And there is, this universe is a creation. I have to reason back to a cause, a creator. As we said earlier, space, matter and time had a beginning. The cause has to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal and intelligent based on the evidence. So I'm reasoning from the effect of creation back to a cause. If there's design in the universe and design in life, we just mentioned some of the design. DNA, this 32 or 3.2 billion letter software program, that's an effect. We have to reason back to a cause. What could have caused a code like that or the fine tuning of the universe? Some great intelligent mind. If there's a moral law written on our hearts that says this is right and this is wrong, then there has to be a moral law giver. So the moral law is the effect, the cause is the moral law giver. If there's evidence, a man predicted and accomplished his own resurrection from the dead, that's the effect. You reason back to a cause. What could cause a man to predict and accomplish his own resurrection from the dead? Only a being like God. By the way, Steve, we even do this personally. We reason from effect to cause. If you think God has answered your prayer, for example, the effect is the prayer, you're reasoning back to the cause, you're saying the cause is God. This is what scientists do. This is science. You always reason from effect to cause. In fact, the queen of all sciences is theology. It's always been the queen of all sciences. Only in the past two centuries have people said, oh no, it's not anymore. No, theology is the queen of all sciences because it takes all of the areas of academic inquiry and puts them under one truth, God's truth. Theology answers, does God exist? And if he does exist, how does physics, how does biology, how does anthropology, how does sociology, how does psychology, how do all of these academic disciplines fit under one big rubric of truth? Because when you go to university, Steve, you're supposed to be able to find unity and diversity. We don't teach that at the university anymore. Now, you'll know a lot if you get a PhD perhaps about the mating habits of the African fruit fly, but you won't know the meaning of life or the purpose of life. That's a tragedy.

Speaker 3:
[74:59] We got about two and a half minutes left speaking of tragedies. You and I are recording this on the six-month anniversary of Charlie's assassination. You were there. You and I had a talk about this on our show shortly thereafter. Folks can go back into our podcast archive and listen to that. Let's move forward though. Charlie's great heart beyond America was to reach the next generation of young men in particular for the gospel. I asked you a few minutes ago, but are you seeing evidence of young men coming to the gospel? We're getting questions that are being hotly debated. Israel, is it still a prophetic nation or not? Should we splinter or not? Charlie also wanted to try to hold us together as broad of a coalition as possible, but around those first principles. In the six months since he passed on and was murdered, how are we doing in your view, Frank, and how could we do better?

Speaker 4:
[75:47] Well, Charlie was the great unifier. He was the glue that kept the conservative movement together. I don't know what's going to happen here in the future, but all this splintering in this infighting, I hope does not translate into electoral losses. But the more important point, of course, is that Charlie was concerned about the gospel going forward. And that's one reason we have to be politically engaged, Steve, is because politics affects your ability to preach and live the gospel. If you don't think so, go to some of the countries I've been to. I've been to Iran. There's no Calvary Chapel of Tehran. I've been to Saudi Arabia. There's no First Baptist Church of Mecca. I just got back from Egypt not long ago. If you wanna start a church in Egypt, you're gonna have a lot of trouble from the government. Why? Because politically, they've ruled it out. So if for no other reason we have to be engaged politically is to protect our ability to preach and live the gospel. And secondly, we're also commanded to love our neighbors, and that means we should put laws in place to protect innocent people from evil. I asked Christians who say we ought not be involved in politics, do you think Christians should have been involved in eradicating slavery politically? And then I just be quiet. And see what they say, because they're going to have to say yes, okay. So yeah, we have to be engaged politically, and that's what Charlie was so good at doing.

Speaker 3:
[77:06] Frank, how can people quickly, how can they follow your work, my friend?

Speaker 4:
[77:09] crossexamined.org, Crossexamined with a D on the end of it. Also, we have a podcast. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. You can find that there. Our YouTube channel is Crossexamined, two words, and we have a TV show. It's all on our website, crossexamined.org.

Speaker 3:
[77:22] Frank, this was every bit as outstanding as I knew it was going to be. Thank you. More in a moment.

Speaker 4:
[77:26] Thank you. God bless you, Steve. Keep going, bro.

Speaker 2:
[77:28] The Steve Deace Show.

Speaker 3:
[77:29] But we are brought to you by Pocket Hose, and I will admit, I was a little skeptical until I tried it out. My Pocket Hose is fantastic, and that's why it's the number one expandable hose in the world. Super lightweight, easy to manage, easy to store. Turn the water on and it grows. Turn the water off and it shrinks back to pocket size, which makes storing easier. No more of those kinks and everything else that annoy you as the year goes on, right? And it's reinforced. Pocket hose ballistic is reinforced with a liquid crystal polymer that is used in bulletproof vests. So for now, for a limited time, when you purchase the new pocket hose ballistic, you'll get a free 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a free thumb drive nozzle as well. Just text Deace to 64,000 to take advantage of this offer. That's Deace, my last name, D-E-A-C-E to 64,000 for your two free gifts with this purchase. Text Deace to 64,000, message and data rates may apply. Text Deace to 64,000. We are brought to you by one of my all time favorite books and its latest film adaptation from our friends at Angel Studios Animal Farm. One of the great stories in the history of Western civilization is now a feature film from our friends over at Angel Studios. And this is a movie that's gonna leave you with something to think about rather than numbing your brain. Angel is brave enough to bring this story to theaters and it is an incredible story you do not want to miss about the dangers, not just of totalitarian regimes, but what we see with betrayal versus hope, etc. Dangers of oppression and more. It's more than a retelling. It's an immersive cinematic story that will entertain families while sparking meaningful conversations about power, corruption, and freedom. To see Animal Farm in theaters on May 1st, tickets are available now at angel.com/animalfarm. That's angel.com/animalfarmrecommended for ages 11 and up. angel.com/animalfarm. Well, I almost feel like we need an Evergreen podcast to break down this Evergreen podcast. All right, I mean, that was just 90 minutes, folks. That was the abridged version of what Frank brings to the table. And you can see why he has become one of the more called upon and respected apologist and theologians in modern American evangelicalism, and why Charlie trusted him so much. And made him basically his personal theology coach. And they did so many events together, including the very last event that Charlie did. At the time we're recording this six months ago, last year. So Todd and Erin, you guys had a chance to get a front row seat to this conversation. The floor now on behalf of the audience is yours.

Speaker 5:
[80:29] Yeah, I've got a specific and a general comment. Specific starting at the end there. So important to talk about the whole notion of God of the Gaps and the Queen of the Sciences. Because amongst the Smarmy Smart Set, the implication is, but has always been at some level, that faith is what happens when you just give up on intelligence. You don't feel, honestly, it has something to do with the questions that sometimes, you're asked, Steve, help me out. I don't feel like equipped, or I feel caught off guard. And so they're assaulted by people who may, you know, just more gray matter, thinking is easier, you know, it's just like jumping is easier for athletes, it comes more naturally to them. And so faith is the place you go when you give up on thinking. And Frank, while some of this comes naturally to him, but some of this he's worked out in the gym of the mind, the heart and the soul for a very long time. And he proved to you that the opposite is true. The queen of the sciences is the fulfillment. Theology is the fulfillment of thinking. It is the final destination of thinking, which is why-

Speaker 3:
[82:02] Or the first, maybe the first and the last for that matter.

Speaker 5:
[82:06] Yes, Alpha and Omega. Which is why, Steve, you often talk about the historical timing of Christ's life having to do with Roman infrastructure and the roads and being able to go, Matthew 28.

Speaker 3:
[82:19] What does the Bible mean when it says, when the time was right, God sent his son? Well, what was right about that time? Yes.

Speaker 5:
[82:24] I think that was the final thing that was right around that time. I absolutely think, and some Christians have pointed back to Socrates and Plato as they call them the original apostles or something like that, affectionately. So they weren't Christians, but they were like Roman roads. Greek thinking was necessary to come before Christ could came because Christ meant to rule over all. And while that thinking took us a long way, the seeds were planted early on about the very things that now today are still being used by people like Frank to just think through the arguments, the cosmological argument, the teleological argument.

Speaker 3:
[83:15] Interconnectivity and those kinds of things.

Speaker 5:
[83:16] They were back then.

Speaker 3:
[83:16] Greek philosophy brought to the table.

Speaker 5:
[83:18] 400 years before the time of Christ. Yep. He's meant to fulfill those. Boy, time of fulfillment is at hand. Hmm, that works on multiple levels.

Speaker 3:
[83:26] And Paul, you see Paul follow what you're talking about when he goes to Mars Hill, when he goes to the Areopagus, right? He does not rebuke them for all their various signs of searching for truth. But he points to the unknown altar and says, now, the God that you made this altar to, knowing there had to be a missing piece to all of this, that there was a missing ingredient to all of this, I'm the one that he is sent to show you what is the missing piece, what is that what puts all the rest of your puzzle into place, right? That's kind of his presentation. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[83:56] And the crime of a college education, what he said there at the end, you know, that he just don't really know anything broadly of what it means to be human. I just thinking back to all of the various arguments that he spread out, thinking back to when I, when I had my awakening as a lifelong Christian. And there's never a time you would have asked me, do you believe in God? There's never a time I would have said no. But I certainly didn't live like that. And after graduating from college, it just, it came upon me powerfully that I had to go in search of all of the answers. I remember as Frank's talking there, I remember specific times where a certain one of those came to me, I remember where they came to me in certain books. And I look back so fondly on that journey, because it was my real education. And it, adventure and the words that come to mind as Frank is talking and my own life is fleshed out in having all of that DNA, that Christian DNA given firm, solid ground. You know, the parable of the sower, where it was my life now is what it is because of that road. It was just a, it was a wonderful journey that I have the luxury of, and Aaron does, because we aren't asking the questions in real time like you are, Steve, but that I really experienced a great debt of gratitude, and the fact that the Holy Spirit just shook me in that moment as a young man in his early 20s, and said, if you're willing to follow me, I will show you. And I found it in so many ways and through so many people, and now my cup runneth over.

Speaker 3:
[86:05] Amen. Aaron.

Speaker 2:
[86:07] I think the question when we hear presentations like that, that we all have to be very honest with ourselves about, and I think it should be very challenging to each and every one of us, is are we living up in a worthy way to a faith like you just heard articulated there? And what do I mean by that? You look at any of the arguments that were laid out, and so well articulated, you can go back to the fact that in this period of time, when it comes to the existence of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, the truth of that resurrection, that women were not exactly highly esteemed in that time, and yet it was the underpinning, or at least the first underpinning of the truth of that resurrection was the account of women. You go back even further than that. We had actually, ironically, the day that we taped this, we had Jeremiah Johnston on to discuss a number of things. One little nugget that he dropped, there is more truth to the existence and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is more evidence for that than there is about the crossing of the Rubicon. You want to make the cosmological argument. Everything that exists has a cause. The earth, the cosmos began to exist, therefore it has a cause. You want to take any of these arguments whatsoever. Any of them. And we have a faith that is titanium. It's just absolutely titanium for those who have ears to hear. And what do I mean by that? I don't mean some wishy-washy, I don't mean some mystic meaning behind that. I just mean, are you really honest? Are you ready to have an honest conversation about any of these things? But are we living up to that faith? Are we, truly? When you examine them in any which way that you want to, any which way that you want to, whether that's the cosmological argument, whether that is the truth of the resurrection, the evidence for the resurrection, whether it's if you get to the point that you agree the resurrection, there's a lot of evidence for the resurrection, then why would any of these authors of the Old Testament, why would any of those prophecies about Christ coming, it just strains credulity that those would then be wrong, and it strains credulity therefore that the rest of the New Testament would be wrong. It's airtight no matter which way you slice it. But yet there are way too many Christians, most Christians at least in the West, who would rather I think ponder the lint in their navel, hide their light under a bushel, than letting it shine. You just heard 90 minutes there almost, 110 minutes, 120 minutes. You just heard letting the light shine. You just heard letting the lion out of its cage. And these were academic arguments as well. These are arguments that have been studied, have been tested, and have proven the test of time. And you look at just another thing, as far as proving the test of time, there goes. How often do we have conversations on the show anymore about Big E evolution?

Speaker 3:
[89:42] Almost never.

Speaker 2:
[89:43] Almost never? That just lends itself. I mean, think of saying that 20 years ago. Certainly 30 or 40 years ago. We hardly ever have those conversations because what Frank said is right, it's on its last legs. Now, we've got other substitutes in there. We're trying to, the secular realm, it doesn't really exist. The secular realm is trying to change the conversation to whatever they can. We have a faith that is airtight, that is hard as titanium, and that can be, if it is rightly divided, that can stand up to any test. And again, the meme of the troubled stick figure saying, hey, it's saying to the visage of Jesus, why are you giving me your toughest battles? Bro, your opponents are literally infertile, stupid people. It's just, on some level, if we're all being honest with ourselves, when it's laid out like what you just heard, when the case for our faith is laid out the way that you heard, we should all be a little bit, just a little bit, at least a little bit embarrassed that we're not doing more to let the light out.

Speaker 5:
[90:59] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[91:00] And that's what's really, we should be really convicting for all of us.

Speaker 3:
[91:05] That'll preach right there. We're not saying that there are not good challenges to Christianity. We're not saying that. What we're saying is that we think Christianity has good answers to those challenges. All right. And it testifies more to the truth of text of Christianity, that it acknowledges there are good challenges. You, because of sin, you should be wrestling with, why does a loving God permit evil? The fact you're wrestling with that is an answer to that various question to a point. The whole Stephen Hawking thing that Frank mentioned, well, the universe just would have created life. Well, why? Why? Why does there have to be intelligent life anywhere? I mean, aren't we often told that we're the impediment to the natural world here, human behavior is? So why does there have to be intelligent life anywhere?

Speaker 5:
[91:56] Once again, this is the answer to that question, is theology is the queen of the sciences, because that guy didn't think he was accountable to anything but itself.

Speaker 3:
[92:05] By the way, what's the most powerful piece on the chessboard? The queen, the queen has the most power of any piece on the chessboard. So I think, I think the challenge is you have to come up with a world view then that sufficiently answers the most important questions. Good luck. Why is the world the way it is? Why are we the way we are? And what can be done about it? And when you bring up your alternative theories as to those three things, you'll have to also then answer in practicum, well, how come they haven't been attempted yet? Right, I mean, we've tried every form of government, we've tried every form of philosophy that we know, right?

Speaker 5:
[93:01] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[93:02] So, well, why hasn't, what you're suggesting is the counter to Christianity. Why hasn't it worked? Years ago, I did a, when I was first starting out, I did a three hour show with a Muslim apologist who was traveling the country when I was on WHO. And I had just come out of this era where I had spent those like three years of a tense study on my belief system. So I wanted to, let's test this a little bit. And this was with, he was Greek. His parents emigrated to Greece, emigrated to Greece from a Muslim country. So he grew up Greek. So he understood a lot of Western thought and things of that nature, even though he inherited his parents Islamic views. And I kept asking him the question I just posed to all of you. If your view of Islam, that it is one of freedom, not bondage, that it is one of, because one of the things, Islam created all these advantages and the sciences and stuff. None of this is actually true, by the way, but we'll just go, I won't even challenge this. I won't. Then I asked him, show me, towards the end of the conversation, I asked him, show me a culture in the world dominated by Islam, where they are living in mass, along what you're claiming Islam actually is. Then show me, where is it? How many examples do you think he can come up with? Zero. Came up with zero examples. When I asked him to explain this, his excuse was, well, you know, Islam's never been allowed to flourish because of colonization. I asked him, well, who did the colonizing? He didn't have an answer. I said, I'll answer it for you. And my guess is, you know, you just don't want to say. Muslims. That was the Ottoman Empire, who colonized the Islamic world. Did we do that? No, the Ottomans did. The Muslims colonized the Muslims. So what you're saying is that the most powerful expression of Islam in the history of this world, the Ottoman Empire, was motivated by Islam to squash Islam. I promise you what you're going to find is a lot of your apologetics for your belief system come from making the other side defend their beliefs. And they don't have a lot of good defenses. They don't. That's why they call you names. If they had good defenses, they wouldn't have to resort to calling you names. They'd start with those. Great job by Frank Turek. Appreciate him joining us today. Todd and Aaron, thanks for your commentary as well. We will see you the next time right here on Blaze TV Radio and Podcast. Until then, go hard. Roman's A28.